Effect of laser radiation wave front conversion

The method of wave front conversion of laser radiation of small intensity, is developed. The laser neodymium with a three-stage amplifier has been used in the experiment. The length of active elements canstitutes 680 mm, the diameter-45 mm. Two laser beams entered the cell with active substance, where the light-guide was placed: one is a powerful (its power is essentially higher than that of the threshold value, and the conditions of the scattering regime with of the wave front conversion are fulfilled for it), and the other is low intensity beam, its power is lesser than the threshold value. Simultaneously registrated is divergence of the initial laser beam and the beam coming from the amplifier in the direction of targets. The results have shown, that divergence of these beams is absolutely the same. The maximum energy of the amplified pulse in both cases is limited by the destruction of active elements and it constitutes 50 j with the use of 2 ns pulse duration. The equivalent divergence of the increased radiation constitutes 2x10-5 rad using the wave front conversion effect. It is shown that the pulses of about 1 ns duration can be obtained by this method using active media of carbon petrachloride with hypersonic wave attenuation of the order of 1 ns